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STUDENT CUSTOMS. 



fi. STAM.KV HALL 



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STUDENT CUSTOMS. 



BY 



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Gl STANLEY HALL. 



From Tkoceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, at the 
Annual Meeting, Octobek 24, 1900. 



%'^nmUx, Pais^., 'W. ^. % 

PRESS OF CHARLES HAMILTON, 
311 Main Street. 
1901. 



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Tfipsa-ooai^o 



STUDENT CUSTOMS. 



The very word leisure with the halo of conceptions about 
it has a unique charm in this world of toil, moil and 
drudsjerv. It is the literal meanino; of the Greek word 
school. It suggests the eternal paradise of childhood. 
There might be a vigorous plea for a kind of l)iological 
aristocracy whose wealth freed them from the need of 
refraining from what they want to do and doing what they 
do not Avish to do. Such a class, left to the utter freedom 
of their own inclinations and isolated from all pertur- 
bations, might serve as an ethnic compass to point out the 
direction of human destiny. "We could thus cast the 
human horoscope from what those best by birth and 
heredity most strongly preferred to do, think and feel. 
This condition Avould, hoAvever, for the most part be only 
a prolongation through life of the conditions which actual- 
ly do prevail in school and college, where picked youth 
and maidens are protected from the necessities of self- 
support, exempted from competition, business and to some 
extent from social restraint, and Avithin the largest prac- 
ticable limits left free to folloAv their OAvn Avill. A strange, 
fascinating polymorphic human seminarium it is. A chap- 
ter might l)e written upon the effects of the ncAV freedom 
as seen in the choice of subjects under the elective system 
alone, and the complex reciprocities and compromises 
betAveen studies that are supposed to fit for something 
later and those Avhich have immediate interest. The best 
of all fields, however, for studying the spontaneous ex- 
pressions of humanity at its })eriod of greatest vigor during 



the entire adolescent period is the history of student life, 
which has never been considered from this standpoint. 
Here Ave have groups of picked young men so associated 
as to develop every tendency and instinct of their stage of 
life on Le Bon's principles of the psj^chology of crowds 
and isolated from the great world with no other vocation 
than to develop themselves. Association with their peers 
flfives them a new standard of measuring themselves. The 
sudden rupture of home ties makes the intense gregarious 
spirit of our race seek still more intense expression in 
friendships, club life and perhaps conviviality. Each taste 
and trait can find congenial companionship in others, and 
thus be stimulated to more intensity and self-consciousness. 
Very much that has been hitherto repressed in the ado- 
lescent soul is now reinforced by self-confidence, some- 
times over-assertive to the point of arrogance. I believe 
there is no psychic field wherein all the many comparisons 
now looming up or awaiting definition between the growth 
of the human individual and the development of the race 
can be better studied than here, first because these groups 
are so numerous and second because not onl}^ the ontoge- 
netic but also the phylogenetic side is accessible in living 
examples. 

The race factor in tracing this comparison is largely lost 
for early childhood, because the stages of man's develop- 
ment that correlate with it are just those missing links, 
which perhaps we can never restore. Whether we agree 
with Munro, who urges that the transition from the simian 
to the human stage took place in a rather limited geographi- 
cal area and in a relatively small time, so that the chance 
of ever finding intermediate links is very small, or incline 
to the view of a few of our contemporaries who think the 
present lower human races are survivals of these inter- 
mediate links which threw off shoots all the way from some 
simian or subsimian form up ; or incline, on the other 
hand, to hold with the polygenists to some proto-human 



"urtypus" or prefer the monophiletic theory, psycho- 
genetic work in this tield, which may eventualh^ contribute 
toAvard the bridging- of this chasm, is so far unable to con- 
struct iso-cultural lines for a very important period of 
early childhood. But for the method of parallelism and 
recapitulation in all cultural matters, the material is no- 
where so rich as in student life. On the one hand anthro- 
pologists are now giving us more and more exhaustive 
accounts of all phases and stages of savage and barbarous 
life almost from the cave dwellers up, while its counterpart 
makes a large part of all we know of the spontaneous 
unforced life of our academic youth. 

The varying conditions of this life, from those of early 
asceticism, when students had no fire, went out to walk only 
under special restrictions, were poor and had to work for 
self-support as up to recent times in the Scotch universi- 
ties, rose to early prayers before light, had hard beds, 
found no vent for their superabounding animal spirits in 
athleticism, conformed to the rigors of monastic life with 
its fasts and penalties, or were exposed by overwork and 
restraint to the reactions of excessive license, rioting, dis- 
sipation, theft, pillage, vandalism, and even assaults, rapes, 
burglaries and murders, such as often occurred in the 
universities of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, illustrate almost everj'^ phase of the secret asso- 
ciations so characteristic of savagery with elaborate initia- 
tions, abuses perpetrated on new students, the great 
religious and sceptical movements, athleticism, self-gov- 
ernment, ideals of honor, personal encounters, warfare 
with faculty and town, amusements and all phases of 
su])civilized human life. 

Unique among the forms of overflowing animal spirits 
among students, we must place what I ma}'^ call psychic 
infantilism or downright babyism. Our returns, rather 
copious upon this subject thougii by no means extensive 
enough to be final, indicate that modes of treating an 



imaginary infant lead to other factors in this kind of fun 
making. Often, perhaps, with the aid of a dummy, which 
in some college theatricals is a rather elaborate manikin 
with various mechanical devices, the child is dandled, 
trotted, chirped and babbled at, bibbed, kissed, spanked, 
nursed, rocked, hugged, pounded, and perhaps torn to 
pieces. Next comes putting the child to sleep with elabo- 
rate pantomime nocturne songs with characteristic serio- 
comic expressions. Bal\y talk of the most extravagant 
types comes next with the curiously intermingled factor of 
play upon the sillinesses of lovers' expressions. Our 
record shows that some students have become real virtuosos 
in imitating various types and forms of crying in a way 
that has strange power over the risibilities of their mates, 
when duly accompanied with antics, attitudes, acts and 
facial expressions. In much of this, reversionary tenden- 
cies are mingled with extravagant parodies of the effusions 
of feminine tenderness to babies. 

Another feature is the tendency to lapse to interjec- 
tional, exclamatory and sometimes onomatopoetic forms of 
expression, speech music, the intonations of the a's and o's 
to which modern philologists ascribe such primitive and 
germinal power at a certain stage of speech development 
which is marked and distinct., Many shades of approval or 
dissent and reactions of sentiment are expressed by vocali- 
zations that cannot be called verbal, which letters and 
musical notation cannot designate, and which in their vari- 
ety and expressiveness may be compared to the very 
fecund baby talk I have elsewhere collected wherein the 
modern philologist may, if he will, now study one of the 
original and still flowing fountains from which human 
speech originated.' Vocal noise, that is not speech, gib- 
berish, mimicry of imperfect articulation or defect, Choc- 
taw, no word of which can be found in Mr. Trumbull's 



» See my " Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self." Am, Jour, of Pay., April, 
1898, Vol. IX., pp. 351-395. 



dictionary of that tongue, and nowadays Chinese that has 
no Mongolian elements in it, the unction of the college 
yells, a list of which furnishes data for a study by itself, 
to say nothing of the brogues, dialects, pigeon English, 
slang, gutteralism, animal noises, mimic instrumentation 
of many a college song, indicate the strength of this post- 
adolescent recreative reversion to the well marked glibber- 
ish and hog latin stage of childhood, which Chrisman and 
others have studied. 

A marked form of academic relaxation may be desig- 
nated as nonsense or rather anti-sense. Why the mind 
delights thus to make utter break with every normal asso- 
ciation and every sane coherence and sequence of thought, 
as if there were really in the world a new " silly cure," it 
is hard to explain. Mr. Lear's idiotic doggerel, the entire 
vocabulary invented in "Alice in Wonderland," of which 
Kipling so fecund as a word creator is nowhere truer to life 
than in incorporating or adding to in Stalky and Co.'s 
conversations, Mother Goose and every form of arrant 
fluid fatuity, bathos and banality, that often challenge the 
disgust of adults — all these flourish like rank weeds in the 
mental acreage where professors of language seek to culti- 
vate the prim proprieties of correct and elegant expression. 
Perhaps they loosen the mental soil ; perhaps like slang 
they are a l)etter vent than Addisonian English for the 
intense but unformed psychoses of this stage of life. At 
any rate the sensation of seeing young gentlemen with the 
first tender crop of beard, hair parted in the middle, with 
glasses suggesting an owlish Minerva wisdom, and perhaps 
in evening dress, giving vent at college concerts, class 
day, athletic or other festivities, to these juvenilities 
arouses, as near as I can analyze it, a strange melange of 
a tendency to laugh at its humor, weep at or at least 
pity its folly, not without a spice of disgust at its waj'ward 
frivolity. 

The so called orations of Bill Pratt enjoyed by many 



8 

a generation of Williams' students ^ illustrate the relax 
ation of disconnecting the normal associative links on 
which reason and common sense rest and allowing the 
intellectual elements of our personality to lapse into poly- 
morphic elements such as we sometimes see in grave men- 
tal lesions. Is this after all a world of chance, essentially 
acosmic, save for the practical order in which man has 
arranged some of its elements for his own greater conven- 
ience and eflSciency, and are its factors per se just as 
connectable in any one of thousands of other orders as 
in those which experience and science have so laboriously 
built up? If so, does the mind tend at certain times to 
thus revert to primitive chaos to find therein some intima- 
tions of a surcease of everj^ kind of constraint, even that 
of sense and sanity? 

College songs illustrate this. Some are characterized 
by animal noises, — bow wow, meow, ba, moo, cackle, 
quack. Familiar ditties and refrains like cocachelunk, 
pollj^- wolly-doodle , chickery-ry e-co-ry e-chin-chan , shoo l- 
i-rool, bingo, uralio, upidee, rum-stj'^-ho, rig-jag-jig, 
sweedle-la-we-tschu-hira-sa, tidium-bzt-bzt, rootle-tum , 
o-tsche-se-no-de-ki ; alliterations like zizzy-ze-zum, the 
grip-car gripman's grip, kimo kemo, the chipper chappie, 
are in point here. 

Banalities in song like. Saw the emerald freshman's 
leg off, the tinker and cobbler, ba-be-bi-bo-bu, balm of 
Gilead, Tobias, yah yah, the bull dog, yahe yaho, the 
endless variations on Mary's little lamb, the catchy baby- 
ism of the Sunday-school scholar, some of the love ditties 
with an intended saccharinity that is almost saponaceous, 
the recent and notable increase of the neg^ro song: contin- 
gent with its contagious rag time, some of the bibulous 
songs wherein the incoherence of intoxication is repre- 
sented, and the growing number of songs parodying Bible 
tales and incidents, illustrate in song at once the spell of 

iBUl Pratt, the Saw-Buck philosopher, Williamstown, 1895, 



9 

extreme fatuity upon the academic mind and also the 
passion for mod icy which Lotzc so deplored in modern 
life. 

The mind ol the modern colleofian deliirhts in few thinsfs 
more than in ])arod3\ Great ino;enuity has been expended 
in caricaturing man}'^ of the famous literary productions, 
the scope and extent of which lend themselves to this 
device, and nearly all the c:reat characters and burninof 
current questions and pretensions generally are treated 
with at least intended satire. INIock heroics and serio- 
comedies have this advantage, if high themes are essayed, 
they afford a ready shelter for the disappointed suscepti- 
bilities of ambition. Efforts of this class are, however, 
mostly directed against objects, ideals or sentiments which 
are not deeply felt by their authors, and this instinct is a 
beneficent agent in destroying the old clothes of culture 
and doing its Maj^-day house cleaning. There is always 
much in every age and community that greatly needs to be 
executed and buried, and j^et is so entrenched that only 
the shafts of ridicule can reach it. If this often goes too 
deep and attacks that which is intrinsically and always 
good, true and beautiful, I believe that on the whole its 
benefits outAveiofh its harm. We live in an old aafe of 
civilization that has accumulated vast cultural impedimenta 
that ought to be given over to the agencies of ol)livion. 
The race needs to forget a great deal in the past in order 
to press effectively forward to the future, and for one I 
cannot believe with Hegel that satire can ever undermine 
any of the deeper foundations of belief, admiration or 
reverence. Youth refuses to be satisfied with anything 
save the very best ; the second-best palls on its palate, 
and as hypocrisy may be defined as the homage which vice 
pays to virtue, so parody and satire are the homage that 
pedantic i)retension and dry-as-dust learning and mere 
convention and tradition pay to the deeper affirmations of 
the soul. The latter, youth lives b}'^, but is coy in express- 



10 

ing, and its negations are a healthy pruning that leave it 
untouched and ever revealed to the psychological seer. 

It has been urged that collegians develop more power of 
criticism than of appreciation ; that they can deride but 
not create. That this is a grave indictment and is to a 
great extent just, few will doubt, but the admiration which 
Ruskin praises is itself incipient creation, or is at least a 
lower degree of the same power by which the great artist 
works. I would go further yet and urge that this instinct 
does not only very wholesome scavenger Avork, but that 
its value as a spur to keep professors vital and to perform 
the gadfly function, which Socrates praised, of stimulating 
them to keep their faculties mobilized, to grind ever new 
and better grists, is a sanifying influence. Irony then has 
its place and work. 

The attitude of later adolescent stages toward an earlier, 
more unconscious and instinctive state is a broader theme. 
The freshman must be salted, his greenness must be sea- 
soned, and at no period does everything that is naive seem 
so contemptible as during the stages when insight and self- 
consciousness are developing. Never is the mind more 
highly sensitized to all that illustrates the role of the 
ingenu. The novice who has not cut his eye-teeth, who 
is unsuspicious and credulous, is subjected to every form 
of indignity. Even innocence is more or less despicable 
and in need of deflorescence. No stage of life so well 
exemplifies the one-sidedness of Plato, who urges and 
illustrates in manifold ways how a virtue that is unknow- 
ing is no virtue, that to know the good does not make 
failure to do it more guilty but is half way to complete 
virtue. The sophomore must put off the freshman and all 
his ways and Avorks. From his superior plane he looks 
down upon the preceding year as a pit from which he has 
* been digged, as if he were separated from it by a wide 
interval, and so each succeeding year is richly character- 
ized in college literature as marked by a progress even 



11 

greater thiin it re;illy is. In Germany the Fuchs, Brander 
Fiichs, junger Bursch, Bursch, alter Biirsch, heinos.ster 
Kopf, almost mark great epochs in human evolution. The 
Bejanus or yellow bill i.s a callow lout or hayseed, Avho 
must be made over by upper classmen into a civilized 
being. The annual nodes in human growth are never so 
far apart as at this age and never so accentuated as in 
academic life. Ignorance and insouciance are to 1)e initi- 
ated into the mysteries of a real knowledge of life, each 
class by the paternal culture of the sager class above it. 
One of the strongest currents of college caricature and 
satire is directed against the dress, manners, home-lired 
ideas of religion and practical morality of the novice, who 
is also carefully excluded from certain privileges reserved 
by force if need be for each higher class. From doing 
nothing with consciousness to doing all with it is the 
inarticulated and unformulated but dominant ideal. 

Early boyhood is imitated, mocked and mimicked with 
great gusto by collegians. At Yale seniors for many 
student generations have taken pleasure in reserving for 
themselves alone the right to play top, marbles and hoop. 
The annual peanut bum at Yale ; the molasses candy 
society at Amherst ; the hawkej^-hurley club ; all the ways 
of the good and bad pupil at school and the Sunday-school 
scholar, — are the theme of many an extravaganza in song, 
game, college theatrical, etc.^ 

Feminism so far as the histories of academic life show 
is a modern fad relatively unknown in mcditeval times. 
Now we have old maid clubs and clatches, female imper- 
sonations sometimes even in falsetto, very clever mimicries, 
every item of woman's ways, handkerchief, fan, motion, 



' For many of the facts and dates in what follows I take pleasure in acknowledj;- 
ing my indeV)tedness to my former pupil, Henry D. Sheldon, whose memoir 
accepted at Clark University last summer as a dissertation for the dejiree of Ph.D. 
is soon to appear in book form from the press of D. Appleton & Co. entitled 
" Student Life and Customs." To this work as by far tlie best treatise on the 
subject the reader is referred. 



12 

gait, toilet, every art of the coquette and even the dllu- 
meuse from the age of dolls on to the stage of maturest 
colleofe widowhood are felt and acted out, characterized in 
journalistic skit with a verisimilitude that excites grave 
reflection. Can a truly manly nature thus devirilize him- 
self and take on so naturally all the secondary qualities of 
the other sex without evincing either defective masculinity 
or else tending to induce feminism. The best female im- 
personators, so far as my observation and inquiry go, are 
those who in form, voice, or natural disposition suggest 
deficient and sometimes even abnormal sexual development. 
We know too from the sad and unspeakable new chapter of 
psychology that deals with aberrations in this field, that the 
passive pediast has special gifts or abilities in the line of 
acting^ female roles. As long as this is Avell seasoned with 
rough and rather coarse mannishness, thinly veiled with 
gown and affectation of the ways of womanhood, it is harm- 
less, but I am convinced from considerable study in this 
field that the modern refinements now so prevalent in this 
direction tend to pyschic emasculation, and that some 
traces of a corresponding danger are imminent in the 
converse impersonation of male parts by college girls. 

It is well established that during a few 3^ears which 
precede pubescence, boys 'are prone to illustrate certain 
definite traits of savage life. Their organizations (as Mr. 
Sheldon has shown), if spontaneous are likely to be 
predator3^ So college life repeats this tendency in a 
secondary way. In a leading college lately a cave elabo- 
rately fitted up was discovered with the beginnings of a 
kitchen midden of bottles and chicken bones, as the home 
of the H-E-0-T-T- society. These letters, so mystifying 
to outsiders, stood to the initiated for " Ho, every one that 
thirsteth." The "rangers," an interesting organization of 
a university of the far west ; the old pandowdy club of 
Bowdoin, one function of which was the barbaric serenade 
of hated professors ; the ' ' ranters " of the University of 



13 

Virginia, who robbed hen and turkey roosts, shaved the 
manes and tails of horses, etc. ; clubs sometimes extempo- 
rized for a season and sometimes lasting for decades 
devoted to corn roasts, watermelon stealing, the piebald 
painting of houses, collections of gates, pig roasts ; ghost 
clubs to terrorize those who fell under their ban ; associa- 
tions to mortify in many ways the pride of individual 
students or townspeople and sometimes inflicting grave 
injury ; societies for roguish pilfering, sometimes of 
kitchens, gardens, barnyards, stables, sometimes for squir- 
rel and other hunts ; ever}'^ form of rowdyism and some- 
times excursions on holidays or vacation wanderings and 
migrations, — all these are outcrops of tendencies dominant 
in and characteristic of savage but repressed in civilized 
life, but are of course here veiled and more or less con- 
doned to self and others as practical jokes. In one code 
a freshman's room and even his trunk may be robbed of all 
valuables, and only pipes, collars, neckties and canes kept. 
Edibles of all sorts, whether a box from home or a class 
banquet, are the property of whoever can get them by 
strategy or force, but booty or plunder is sometimes pre- 
scrA'cd and handed down to classes or societies as tokens 
of prowess. All this is excused, now to greater and now 
to less extent, with margins ever vacillating with time and 
marked by great geographical variations. Youth must 
have its fling, and the warm place that such escapades hold 
in the memory of adult alumni still serves to protect and 
even defend them, although athleticism has diverted into 
healthier channels much of the riotous and superfluous 
energy which formerly went into these licensed invasions 
of human right and personal liberty. 

In the treatment of younger men and classes, we can 
mark three distinct forms of aggression into the sacred 
precincts of personality. The lowest of these is repre- 
sented by pennalism, which in some respects was hardly 
less at its period of greatest development than slavery, 



14 

and which survives in fagging. The fags of the great 
English school had to run to an}' upper form men and the 
last comer must do his bidding. Sometimes he is sent 
on a twenty-mile errand ; his calves are toasted ; he is 
branded, tattooed, beaten, bullied in many cruel ways 
which really infringe the criminal code. Elsewhere each 
under classman is assigned to a member of the upper form, 
who protects him from alien imposition, but requires ser- 
vices. In the English schools, the latter is now generally 
reduced to copying, serving breakfast, perhaps making up 
washing or performing other quite minor services, which 
tradition has prescribed with great definiteness. A gen- 
eration ago the fag must play music at night for his 
master, if so ordered and if he could ; must help him 
safely home if drunk ; must look out for the food and 
drink served in his room ; keep his accounts ; make cer- 
tain minor expenditures and perform special mechanical 
services connected with examinations. 

Hazing, which literally means ham stringing, may be 
described as breaking in raw student recruits, teaching 
them respect and obedience to upper classmen. In the 
ancient universities of Paris and Bologna, the new comer 
was described as a Avild beast to be tamed or domesticated, 
subjugated to the harness. He was dressed as a boar, 
his ears were clipped, his teeth filed, his hair or beard cut, 
or even singed. He was green grass to be cured, wood 
to be seasoned, unclean and in need of purification, he 
was scoured with soap and sand ; and bodily mutilations 
leaving scars for life were occasionally inflicted. In early 
German universities, he must be passive and let others 
work their complete will upon him. He was made to 
eat dirt and glass ; drink from a shoe ; and to make him 
drunk was a common diversion. In one old New England 
college the custom of parodying the " infare " still sur- 
vives, and the student is finally put to bed with a pumpkin 
nightcap. In another institution a similar custom still 



15 

survives, with the variant that portions of his body were 
smeared with molasses. In the colonial colletre he was 
mulcted and in one large institution still has to supply 
balls and bats for the upper classmen. In various others 
certain articles of clothing are forcibly appropriated. The 
Yale freshman was elaborately tutored, the upper class 
orator expatiated for his benefit, in a mock heroic way, 
first upon the dangers, second upon the honors of college 
life, and then came a programme of physical treatment. 
In few respects are college communities more conservative, 
and we all remember the regrets at the removal of the old 
Yale fence upon which no Freshman must sit until his 
class team had beaten Harvard. Everyone knows the 
current modes of smoking out, enforced speeches and 
songs, tossings in a blanket, isolation in remote places 
blindfolded, perhaps bound and gagged, e^c, the sup- 
pression of which, neither law, college discipline nor the 
disapproval of the academic sentiment of the overwhelm- 
ing majority can exterminate.^ 

Initiations can best be treated as a class of subjections 
by themselves. The more we know of savage life the 
larger we find the role of such ceremonies. Not only the 
great cycle of initiations sometimes occupying weeks by 
which boys are inducted to early manhood, but many a 
secret order constructs ceremonials of a very high degree 
of symbolic significance, designed to impress not only 
those without, and of course especially the candidates 
themselves, but also the tribesmen within with the great 
importance of membership. A ritual is composed mainly 
from such elements as we see unorganized in hazing, and 
to this a sacred character attaches. This was the case with 
the Eleusinian and other ancient mysteries. The novice 
is observed and studied, and his eligibility is the result of 
diverse comparative estimates. He then sometimes under- 



' The recent investigation of tlia liuzing methods at Weat I'oiiit affonl an inter- 
esting modern instance of these barbaric survivals. 



16 

goes a period of probation with certain duties or restric- 
tions. The ceremonial is generally made up in the Amer- 
ican college secret societies of two parts : one that is elab- 
orately prescribed and must be followed with the utmost 
precision, and another that is extemporized and sometimes 
with special individual adaptations. The impressiveness 
and sometimes the terrors of mystery are always appealed 
to. There are elements from judicial procedure like accu- 
sation and defence ; statement of the candidate's good and 
bad traits ; frequently he is symbolically condemned, exe- 
cuted, nailed into his cofSn ; and }>erhaps buried and 
resurrected to a new life. These procedures are well con- 
cealed, but those I know bear plain traces of a depressive 
minatory or descending, which are sharpl}^ contrasted with 
an ascending and restorative phase. The ethno-psychic 
relationship between these rites and those indicating the 
new birth of the soul with a background to both of the 
resurrection of spring following the death of autumn or 
the Balder motive, are unmistakable. 

Studies in this field show conclusively the inadequacy of 
the current conceptions of pla}^ Avhether the surplus 
energy theory of Schiller and Spencer, the recreation view 
of Lazarus and Steinthal, the {esthetic explanation of 
Guyau, or the social theory of Jean Paul ; but it is most 
of all opposed to the conceptions of Gross that it is the 
preparation for future serious occupation. Indeed, from 
the above and many other facts already gathered but not 
pertinent here, I think we must feel justified in proposing 
a new theory of play, which while not exclusive as others 
claim to be, I think has quite as wide and important a 
range of facts and as much explanatory power as any. 
Play consists, I suggest, in part of reversion to outgrown 
stages and in the repetition, with variations, of acts and the 
expression of instincts that growth has left behind. We 
love to drop back to an older level and dip again into the 
experiences of the paradise of childhood. The charm of 



17 

this consists in the fact not only that Ave leave behind the 
stress of the lialMe line at the front, whicli our ))est mature 
energies seek to advance, but we fall back to a range of 
memories and experiences that are pleasant in themselves, 
and automatically repeat acts characteristic of very primi- 
tive and perhaps even animal stages of human evolution. 

The years of academic life are like a high tableland or 
a mountain ridge, which we cross in passing from infancy 
to old age. At each point on it we can best see and feel 
both ways — protensively toward the future and retroten- 
sively toward the past, as at no other stage of life. Soon 
childish memories and feelings will mostly be lost to view. 
The Colegrove and other studies of memory at different 
ages indicate that a little later childhood becomes a pallid, 
unreal, desiccated thing for memory, preserved as a useless 
rudiment, and consisting only in a few chance images. 
Before this all adult life has seemed remote and unreal, 
but now the soul is Janus faced, looking before and after 
in a very peculiar sense. 

Thus we may understand another new principle which I 
propose, viz., it is a range and mobility up and down the 
genetic ladder peculiar to this age. It is never so easy to 
sink far below the normal or average sense, intelligence or 
effort to abject silliness and folly and babyhood ; but these 
moods alternate with the most strenuous and lofty aspira- 
tions toAvards the highest. I have a number of striking 
cases in my own collections, of collegians who seemed to 
find distinct relief from the hardest and most intellectual 
activity in a degree of banality that would defy belief save 
among the circle of intimate friends who had actually seen 
it. Perhai)s those whose wisdom is veined with the most 
prelusions of senescence are those who can be most baby- 
ish. Some serious young men seem born old and very 
early lose the power, if they ever had it, to be or feel 
young, while others remain all their lives conserved youth 
if not children. Perhaps the former is more common in 



18 

those born of parents a little past the age of the most 
efficient procreative vigor ; the latter of parents who have 
not quite attained it. This power of free and ready move- 
ment up and down the Jacob's ladder of phylogeny, I firmly 
believe to be a resource of very great economic value for 
achievement. In sleep we fall back physically to a lower 
philetic level. The forebrain, then the midbrain sleeps, 
but the medulla never quite sleeps. This functional 
reversion enables us as it were to tap the freshness and 
resources of earlier years and prevents the ossification of 
each stage of the past, like death closing in upon us. 
The vis a tergo of growth which makes us so conscious of 
every stage in the development of life's programme must 
not settle into a horror of childhood or despising our own 
youth, but free movement through all the Nautilus stages 
of growth renews its charm, deepens and broadens symY)a- 
thy, conserves the strong deep life of the heart and thus 
makes the individual more effective when he seeks to storm 
the height of life or summon his resources for a titanic 
effort toward the level of the super-man that is to be in the 
world. Each year as it passes brings a vast and distinct 
development of soul. The twenty-fifth year, e. g., and 
indeed every other, is no doubt marked by nascent periods 
that distinguish it from all years that have preceded or 
will succeed. Although this rapid progression in the 
school of life is obscured and concealed till it is currently 
unsuspected because so disguised by the monotony of ex- 
ternal conditions, the advancement through curricula is, 
compared with it, snail-like and almost imperceptible. 

We must not fail to add, however, that there is here 
some danger of excess. There are those who lack stability 
and whose average variation from the norm is excessive, 
and still more whose instability here savors of neurotic or 
perhaps hysterical disequilibration. We all know speci- 
mens of the type wherein periods of intense endeavor 
alternate with those of puerility, especially if the recur- 



19 

Fences are not daily but interfere with the normal rhythm 
of day and night. There are other rhythms in the male 
and female organisms which must never be interfered with, 
and there is an extreme of childishness which no real man 
can descend to without sacrificing strength of character to 
flexibility of mood. I hold no brief for any current con- 
ception of personal dignity, but praise the teacher who can 
command his school and be a boy with his pupils. The 
man of large affairs or office, who enjoys participating in 
the games of young men ; the mother who can, like the 
stately maids of honor of Queen Elizabeth, play tag with 
her girls, — these natures can never grow old in the many 
ways that make age so often uninteresting and even slightly 
repulsive to the young. This elasticity is one trait in the 
psychology of genius, and if this can be cultivated, so can 
also to some degree at least a little of its true Attic salt. 

The segmentation of years somewhat over-emphasized by 
grades and classes tends to widen sympathy horizontally as 
it were, so that the tendency to exhaust at each stage all 
its possibilities before advancing to the next is favored. 
The abuses of the upper classes, for instance, segregate 
and unify freshmen and strengthen class feeling. We 
cannot, therefore, reg-ard the obliteration of the class unit 
and the substitution of associations with those older and 
younger as an unmixed gain. Again, subordination of 
educational stages, each lower to the next higher, favors 
docility, keeps open sutures which might close prematurely, 
brings pliability, offsets tendencies to precocity and a sense 
of attainment and finality, keeps the psycho-physic organ- 
ism young and growing, and impresses humility without 
humiliation because self-respect can keep itself in coun- 
tenance if endangered by turning to the stage below. 

From the days of Aristotle and Cicero, oratory and 
debate have been prominent educational functions, and 
repeatedly in its history this has been the chief focus of 



20 

educational endeavor. From the dawn of adolescence, 
when the pugnacious instincts develop, debate becomes 
one of its favorite forms of expression. The reasoning 
instincts at this period begin to knit the mental centres to 
a higher unity. The association fibres, which connect the 
various cortical areas, seem to coincide in their growth 
and function with the instinct to think in a logical, causal, 
catenal way, as associations in time and place are being 
made over into those of congruity and similarity. Before 
puberty mental life seems more connected with the projec- 
tion system of afferent and efferent nerves which put the 
soul in rapport with its environment, but now first in 
revery, which is a kind of rude darning stitch, and then in 
coherent logical fashion, the mental content is knit together 
into unity of a higher order. That these reconstructive 
processes should be highly developed and that this consti- 
tutes one of the chief functions of superior education is 
obvious. 

During a prolonged stage of life probably nothing so 
stimulates this process as discussion and debate. Conver- 
sation is never so prone to lapse into disputation. Even 
the dialectic or dialogue form never performs a greater 
function in sustaining interest in even abstract themes. 
No small part of the charm of sociability in the salon and 
even conviviality in student life arises from the clash of 
diverse if not conflicting views. The connotations of the 
very word "conflict" rouse unique zest, just as fear of it 
in paranoiacs may become a phobia. From Plato down to 
Berkeley and many contemporary writers, philosophers 
have often greatly enhanced interest in the most abstruse 
subjects by their dramatic talent, even though the inter- 
locutors are but abstract qualities or schools of thought 
personified. The great discussions of the early Church 
synods and later councils, and the great debates of the 
heroes of the scholastic age, afford abundant illustrations 
of the higher form of the instinctive passion of men to 



21 

quarrel or to witness a fray. To the doctor's thesis in 
Germanj'^ to-day are often added special points which the 
candidate offers to defend against all comers, and imagi- 
nary responders are often set up if there are no real ones. 
The methods of thesis and antithesis are most effective 
and logical, while the orator on the other hand often con- 
jures up a feigned objector or man of straw to demolish. 
In the old universities, the doctorate was conferred when 
the novice could defend the propositions with which he 
challenged or defied the world. The charm of pointing 
out a flagrant fallacy in the arguments of an antagonist or 
of a reductio ad absurdum of his statements of refutation 
and rebuttal or even of rallj^ing specious arguments in a 
lost cause fascinates the youthful mind. 

One of the chief institutions of the American college, 
from the close of the last down to the middle of the pres- 
ent century, was that of the debating societies. Nearly 
every college had two, in each of which great political, 
moral and literary themes of current interest were dis- 
cussed, usually one evening a week with two or three joint 
debates in which representatives of the two societies met 
each other. In the best preparatory schools similar socie- 
ties existed. All who remember these oro;anizations in 
their prime ascribe to them a very high educational value. 
Two or three speakers on each side alternated, there was 
often a critic, a decision, perhaps by a show of hands or 
by the president, who must sum up and weigh arguments 
on both the merits of the question and on that of the dis- 
cussion. There were no seminaries and the dignity of the 
professor did not invite free and unreserved discussion 
in class, but here it could flourish Avith no restraints. 
Youth is the age of aufMdrung . Childish views of the 
great facts and laws of the world are falling off like the 
deciduous teeth. It is the pin-feather age of spread-eagle- 
ism ; individuality is finding its voice and its own proper 
orbit and motion ; style is beginning to be felt, and diction 



22 

almost inevitably falls into some imitative rut — Carlyleian, 
Addisonian, romantic sententious, pompously oratorical — 
the omniscient mental gate of the newspaper leader ; that 
of the satirical under-cut, funniness, and all the stylistic 
affectations seem necessary stages of immaturity before 
thinking finds out its own way and becomes as individual 
as penmanship, as it will do if all these copy-hand forms 
are outgrown. 

These societies in the days of their prime were alwa3^s 
the centre of interest for some of the best men, and gen- 
erally brought to the surface another class of leaders than 
those who excelled in scholarship. Here all social dis- 
tinctions were forgotten ; courses in rhetoric and even 
logic and perhaps history and related subjects were given a 
new interest. The library was ransacked for authorities 
and points for citation ; competition prompted men to buy 
and beg books for society libraries and a new order of 
champions and of hero worship was sometimes developed. 
As these societies declined during the third quarter of this 
century, debates became less studied and serious. The 
social features that had made their very names attractive 
paled before the closer friendships of the Greek letter 
societies, in some of which debates still hold a prominent 
place, but they are sustained with abated ardor perhaj^s 
because conversation has steadily developed in range of 
topics, freedom and animation, so that the growing social 
instincts afford other vents and channels for the same 
interplay of facts and opinions. 

In all the German universities, Vereine exist for the 
discussion, formal and informal, of general and of special 
topics. The Unions of Oxford and Cambridge, Avhich have 
existed with unabated interest for a number of decades, 
are organized and conducted in every possible detail like 
Parliament. Questions take the form of bills which are in 
the end passed or lost by vote. When these were organ- 
ized, they were almost the only medium of intercourse 



23 

between the different colleger, many of Avhich had their 
own debating clubs. These unions are often able to bring 
down leading members of Parliament to defend bills which 
thc}'^ are advocating at Westminster, and statesmen find 
themselves attacked here always with the greatest freedom 
and sometimes with a rare force and acumen. Here as in 
all such organizations young men are great sticklers for 
rules and technicalities, and the details of parliamentary 
usajre are insisted on with extreme strictness and literal- 
ness. The Scotch universities have always shown great 
fondness for these organizations and for discussion. 

Since 1889, on the initiative of Harvard College, which 
had for a few decades conspicuously neglected, if not dis- 
paraged this work, a new stimulus has been given and 
over one hundred colleges are now organized into a league 
for intercollegiate debate. This movement has introduced 
a new method, and even style of work. Champions are 
very carefully chosen after a competition which animates a 
good deal of previous preparation ; the subject is divided 
so that each debater presents a definite part of it. College 
rivalry is much involved and generally its representatives 
are very carefully coached by the professors, under whose 
tuition they rehearse and are prepared to meet the argu- 
ments of the other side. This work has reacted upon the 
curriculum (Sheldon says), and twenty-seven colleges now 
offer one hundred and four courses in forensics and allied 
subjects. These debates rarely reach a high level of inter- 
est or ability, and are sadly lacking in spontaneity. Unlike 
the Oxford and Cambridge discussions they are very rarely 
enlivened by a free play of wit and humor or rej>artee. 

The dangers of the academic debates are great and ob- 
vious, but not insuperable. Often individuals have no free- 
dom of choosing their own sides, and occasionally young 
debaters prefer to talk against their convictions as an 
exercise in cleverness. It is unfortunate too to })ec()me 
prematurely interested in one side of any great open 



24 

question, V)ut perhaps the grayest evil is the danger of 
cultivating too great readiness in speech. This tends to 
superficiality, loose thinking and rabulistic ratiocination. 
It is a mental calamity to be able to talk glibly upon any 
subject. Form should be based on and come after matter, 
and the judicial type of mind which finds or maintains 
equanimity against the widest diversity of view is not 
favored. Young debaters, especially of the preparatory 
and to a less extent of the collegiate stage, are also too 
prone to wrangle, to raise specious, factitious and even 
verbal issues, and sometimes to lapse to personalities. 

Attempt at self-government by students is essentially 
an American experiment, and is recent here and has taken 
many different forms, which Sheldon has collected. One 
is that of a student court like that of the junior and senior 
classes at Trinity ; another is the selection of student rep- 
resentatives to confer with the faculty on matters within 
fields carefully defined ; in still another form the faculty 
selects an advisory board and invests it with power to 
determine and control certain matters along with members 
of the student Ijod}'. Disciplinary committees with power 
over certain offences, even vigilance committees to patrol 
the halls, censors as in the University of Virginia with 
its unique honor system in vogue since 1865, a student 
Senate or House like that of Amherst with power to enact 
laws, illustrate the various types and degrees of student 
autonomy. Other interesting forms are on trial at Stan- 
ford, Maine, South Carolina, Indiana, and elsewhere. 
Nearly one half of the smaller American colleges have 
adopted some form of self-government, which in some is 
carried to an extreme. There is great diversity of need 
and capacity in this respect between different institutions 
and different sections of the country. Many irregularities 
of student life, especially outbreaks of lawlessness and 
sometimes dishonesty in examinations, have been materi- 
ally checked. Students can best detect and best judge 



25 

students. The success of all these schemes depends very 
largely upon the tact and discretion of the president and 
facult3\ In some institutions students on entering are 
requested to sign a form of contract ; in others they pledge 
adherence to carefuUj^ drawn rules. The indefinite and 
volatilized freedom, which is advocated for the period of 
student life in continental Europe, it is often said, is less 
needed in a land where the liberty of suljsequent life is so 
unrestricted as in a republic. 

One of the last sentiments to be developed in human 
nature is the sense of responsibility, which is one of the 
highest and most complex psychic qualities, and in the 
development of which our carefully nurtured and protected 
youth of student age, although perhaps more matured in 
this respect than in any other land, have had little training. 
Necessary as is the discipline of this experience, the col- 
lege is less fitted to give it than the outside world. The 
learner is necessarily receptive, under authority, in a state 
of pupilage, and premature independence is always dan- 
gerous and tempts to excesses. 

The ideal relations between student and professor are 
those of the antique friendship as described by Socrates, 
Aristotle and Cicero. The teacher, as it were, incubates 
the pupil's soul and loves him, and is loved back with a 
devotion which in a degenerate day became sinful and 
scandalous. The joy of infecting the youthful mind with 
the insights and ambitions of maturer j'^ears is, as Phillips 
has shown, the later and culminating function of parent- 
hood. The student of old consulted his mentor for what 
now would send him to the lil)rary. Initiation into life, 
induction into the mysteries of the universe even more 
than the transmission of information, was the purpose. 
The instructor dealt out knowledge as stages of initiation 
into the esoteric mysteries of life, and thus not only was 
youth taught but the inculcator himself received an incal- 
culable moral inspiration to avoid everything unworthy in 



26 

word, deed or manner, to be an heroic ideal and almost an 
object of worship for his protege. 

Academic teaching has lapsed far from this ideal ; partly 
from the reactions against the sensuous abuses of these 
most intimate of all ancient relationships, partly because 
instruction is no longer individual but in groups, but espe- 
cially because teaching itself has degenerated to a trade. 
Of old, pupils were inspired ; now they are driven. Their 
highest powers of endeavor were evolved ; now they are 
often suppressed. Hard as is the doctrine for us peda- 
gogues, I am convinced that in general, disciplinary 
troubles have been inverselj^ as the power of teachers to 
rise to the ideal of their vocation. The history of academic 
life shows that just at those periods when curricula have 
been most impoverished, method most unnatural, and 
matter most remote from the great natural springs of 
human interest, student life has degenerated, and oscilla- 
tions, even to the extremes of severity of the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries, when mature youth were flogged, 
forbidden to go out without surveillance, compelled to 
observe severe parietal rules or ascetic rigors, or to the 
other extreme of license which followed, when students 
robbed, raped and murdered the townspeople and were 
guilty of every unbridled excess and hostile to ever}'^ 
form of restraint. In place of the old amity, students 
and professors have ceased to trust and even grown suspi- 
cious of each other. Within very recent decades and 
often now, student censure is meted out to those who call 
upon an instructor socially, seek information about reading 
or studies ; and the familiar terms, bootlicks, blues, cur- 
riers, piscatores, indicate the ostracism experienced by 
those who seek the goodwill of instructors. Widespread 
convention sanctions reticence and perhaps even lies to 
the faculty, and every act known only to one's fellow 
students is almost as secure of betrayal as if done in some 
organization pledged to secrecy. The history of American 



27 

collcfje life abounds in both open and covered hostilities, 
sometimes with personal assaults upon the members of the 
faculty, but more often in the form of concerted rebel- 
lion. College revolts of old were based more often upon 
com})laints regarding commons' food, but suspicions of 
favoritism, an}'^ increase of the wonted stint of study or 
augmented rigor of examination, suffices. The latter 
caused the famous Harvard outbreak of 1790, which was 
not settled for seven years. The Harvard rebellion of 
1766 interrupted work for about a month. Still more 
serious rebellions occurred there in 1807 and 1830. In 
the southern colleges, riots have been not infrequent. In 
1808 about one half the students were expelled from 
Princeton ; in 1845 all the students but two freshmen were 
expelled from another institution ; a State university not 
many years ago expelled the entire senior class. An 
attempt a few decades since to pledge each college to 
refuse admission to students expelled from another soon 
failed. These revolts have had their literature and show 
that not only classes but often the entire student bod}^ can 
become unified by sentiment and even by organization, 
and offer no exception to the law of mobs in which some- 
times the worse occasionally but always the bolder spirits 
lead those who are by nature orderly. Indeed some of 
these troubles have been abundantly justified and have 
brouijht o-reat and lasting: reforms. 

In Bologna and in Paris, there were student strikes 
and boycotts, and more than once the entire body under 
the lead of the Nations withdrew from town and either dic- 
tated terms before they would return, defying sometimes 
even the Pope, or withdrew to another seat. Here too 
the students were sometimes all right and tlie faculties 
all wrong but usually better wisdom and rectitude are 
found with the latter. The migration of 5,000 students 
from Prague to Leipzig and the exodus from Williams to 
Amherst are also in point in more recent times. Oxford 



28 

asserted the right of appeal from the chancellor. Student 
life always insists upon privileges which of old were granted 
in abundance, in the form of immunities from taxation, 
from arrest save by the university beadle, and incarceration 
in the college prison Avith trial by a college court. Until 
very recent years the German student, who has offended 
the city's ordinances, merely shows his legitimation card to 
a policeman and thereby escapes arrest. Free passes, ex- 
emptions from military service, reduced fees at theatres 
and concerts, were almost universal. To-day wherever the 
whole student body is threatened with the withdrawal of 
what seems prescriptive and traditional rights, it asserts 
itself with a force that few faculties can successfully cope 
with, as witness the efforts at Purdue and elsewhere to 
exterminate secret societies. The right to celebrate im- 
portant events in very irregular ways is an immemorial 
tradition, perhaps even more difficult to suppress than 
hazing. 

American colleges despite the growing freedom of life 
and efforts at self-government still insist upon a state of 
pupilage, especiall}' in matters of study, which favors the 
tendency to regard teachers as natural enemies. Resident 
tutors and night watchmen about dormitories, attempts to 
control hours of study and Retiring now generally aban- 
doned, the time of being in, of rising, attending chapel and 
recitation, punctuality, etc.^ devolve a mass of disciplinary 
details upon college and university faculties which ought to 
be outgroAvn. One of these institutions had lately eighty- 
three punishable offences specified in its rules, and the 
parental theory requires great discretion in its administra- 
tion. The New England professor of the old type feels 
that there is almost no folly of which a class are not 
capable, and understands well that if he makes a fi'iendly 
call upon a student he would be thought a spy. I latelj^ 
counted eleven men asleep at a popular elective lecture, 
and the professor informed me after class that he suspected 



29 

they Avere the men involved in a riotous demonstration the 
night before. Individual instructors are constantly sus- 
pected of punishing real or imaginary offences by con- 
sciously or unconsciously increasing the rigors of the pass 
mark for recitations and examinations. Great as the 
improvement in recent years, especially under the elective 
sj'^stem and athletics, vast progress is yet necessary. 

Just in proportion as young men are absorbed in intel- 
lectual interests, and as professors are able and inspiring 
enough to dominate these interests of the class, this 
antagonism diminishes. It increases just in proportion 
as the chief interests of students are outside the special 
work of the classroom, laboratory or seminar}^ and as 
the professor becomes arid and barren. We often see 
the spectacle of new men or new subjects acting as the 
nucleus of a radical change of sentiment throughout the 
student body in this respect. Youthful sentiment is right. 
There is nothing more worthy of being the butt of all the 
horse play of ephebic wit or practical joke than an in- 
structor from whose soul the enthusiasm of humanity has 
vanished, who has ceased to know and grow, and who 
serves up the dry husks of former knowledge and peddles 
second and third hand information, warmed up from year 
to year, rather than opening new living fountains in which 
the burning thirst of youth can be slaked. The latter's 
instincts are far wiser than they know, for iconoclasm is 
never better directed than against the literalist, formalist 
and sophronist. The well-fed mind, like the well-fed 
body, settles to a state of complacency and satisfaction ; 
and hunger of mind, like hunger of body, is the greatest 
incentive of restlessness and discontent. 

Student organizations present very interesting parallels 
on the one hand to the tribal sj'stem, the features of which 
predominate among younger ; to the guilds of the Middle 
Ages, the ontogenetic analogue of which appears in the 
higher grades of university life. The Nations were spon- 



30 



taneous and democratic associations of students in the 
great mediae val universities who came from the same place. 
They found themselves without political rights in a strange 
town, with their property and even life insecure, and hence 
united for mutual protection, to tend the sick, defend the 
weak, help the poor, and soon succeeded in establishing a 
kind of artificial citizenship which obtained legal recogni- 
tion. These were most fully developed in Italy, where 
the power of student organizations was greatest and where 
the Cismontanes had seventeen and the Ultramontanes 
sixteen nations. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
they were strong in the University of Paris with its four 
nations, — French, Normans, Picards, and English or Ger- 
mans. At Oxford they were feeble, and the two organiza- 
tions — the Boreals and Australes — fused in 1274. In 
Aberdeen the Nations lingered until the nineteenth century 
and traces of them are still found in the Finnish University 
of Helsingfors. In Prague and Vienna, the two oldest 
German universities, these societies existed ; and in the 
former the Czechs and the Germans have been opposed for 
six centuries, and in 1409 the German students withdrew 
to Leipzig. In the fifteenth century the college slowly 
succeeded the Nation as a unit of student organization. 

The " House," as it is still called in the great public 
schools of England, or the colleges of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, was slowly developed from the mediaeval hospices, 
bursa, or inns. Sometimes, as at Rugby, it was originally 
for foundation scholars only. One of the chief works of 
Arnold was to reorganize it so that each boy should here 
have a school home. The modern " hall " has the same 
origrin. The first colleofes of Oxford and Cambridge were 
simply endowed inns, where poor students had board, 
lodging and a common life. At first they elected their 
own principal, as in some of the earlier universities, and 
students employed and discharged professors and elected 
heads. The chancellor of the university, however, gradu- 



31 

ally acquired influence in the halls or inns, because his 
guarantee of financial responsibility was necessary. Later 
he was able to remove bad principals and forbid objection- 
able students. In France the colleges were inspected by 
university authorities and subordinated, but in Oxford 
they were left free and independent. Here they are still 
little subordinated to the university, and each of the 
stronger ones seeks to do its own teaching even in sci- 
ences, although with a great amount of expensive duplica- 
tion ; each has its own cricket team and crew, and by this 
system even in the great secondary schools, the benefits of 
athletics are widely diffused by the competition between 
the different houses. This unit of organization, although 
little known in this country, where it is very iechly 
represented by the dormitory and nearly extinct on the 
continent, was far superior in the strength of its bond or 
its esprit du corps to the Nation. 

The Landsmannschaften, the German analogue of the 
Nations, after an eventful career were forbidden in the 
eighteenth century, but dragged out a long subterrean 
existence. They were originally territorial (Thuringian, 
Schwabian, Westphalian), and soon adopted some of the 
features of pennalism for their novices, inducted to full 
membership with initiation ceremonies, held a catechism 
on the beer Komment, with awful condemnations to infamy 
of all " renoncers ^' or betrayers of secrets or those who 
refused to obey orders of the council, and had their rib- 
bons, ciphers and ceremonial kiss. The Komment treats 
of honor, a most intricate and wonderful thing in those 
days, how it was to be gained, kept, attacked, regained, 
and suggests the Japanese Bushido. The sword was its 
talisman and instrument, and many of the terms and forms 
of the French duel were introduced. The Landsmen could 
be decreed dishonorable on sixteen points ; knew no obli- 
gations to Philistines or townsmen ; were good swordsmen, 
the best of whom were ambitious to score a hundred duels ; 



32 

must fight all former colleagues if they wished to enter 
another society ; and were sometimes guilty of riots, 
marauding, and of excesses occasionally almost bestial in 
their beer duels and other drinking habits. It was two of 
these societies that the philosopher Fichte actually dis- 
suaded to disband and give their regalia to him. 

The Burschenschaften, which originated at Jena in 1816, 
sought to introduce higher and reformatory ideals. The 
famous Wartburo; festival was held in 1817 on the three 
hundredth anniversary of Luther's defiance of the Pope 
just at the period of German3^'s most intense reaction after 
the fall of Napoleon. The Burschen delegates partook of 
the sacrament, listened to an oration by a fellow tribesman, 
Riemann, already knighted by the Iron Cross for bravery 
in the French wars, and who evoked Luther to hear his 
vow in behalf of all to serve the spirit of truth and justice, 
to repel invaders, not to be dazzled by the splendor of the 
monarch's throne from speaking the strong free word of 
freedom and individuality. In the evening twenty-eight 
books, thought to contain un-German views, were burned, 
and not long after the Russian court chancellor, Kotzebue, 
whose book had been burned with the others, to the great 
scandal of the court, was stabbed by a Burschen theologi- 
cal student, Sand. Before this a small minority led by 
Carl FoUen, a leader of the blacks or extreme left wing, a 
disciple of Fichte, and who afterwards taught gymnastics 
at Harvard College, advocated an appeal to force to accom- 
plish at once a republican form of government, which the 
moral reason demanded. The government accordingly in 
1819 abolished the Burschenschaften, removed suspected 
professors, appointed an inspector for each university, and 
banished or imprisoned those who still maintained member- 
ship. Although the Tugendbund of 1822 sought to 
perpetuate the salvable part of the organization, the 
Burschenschaften soon died out, after having greatly 
reduced gambling and duelling and otherwise having mor- 
alized student life. 



33 

The more aristocratic Corps developed as this latter 
oriranization declined. These are the outojrowth of an 
extravagant chivalric sense of personal dignity, self-respect 
and honor, of the passion to enjoy life at the stage of it 
when hilarit}" is most attractive, of a desire to knit the 
ties of friendship as closely as possi*ble, and with a love of 
sentiment unknown in our American life. The Corps, 
almost as much as the Nations, had power to boycott. As 
representing the student body the}^ could launch the ban of 
excommunication against a student, cit}'^ or landlord ; they 
developed a beer drinking Komment Avith an elaborate 
ritual ; held that duelling was the only dignified way of 
resenting an insult. Some American writers have defended 
it as preferable to hazing, but the code lapsed, to decree- 
injr as insults the most fanciful of offences and even to the 
arrangement of almost utterly causeless encounters for the 
delectation of spectators. 

The class as an organization came to its conscious 
development late. Its bonds, although less close and 
clannish than other forms, have been found to be exceed- 
ingl}'^ strong, and until the rise of the elective system in 
the larger colleges the very term classmate suggested life- 
long ties that strengthen with years. It rei)rcsents a type 
of comradeship with far more diversity in it than the 
Greek letter fraternities ; and the reunions, — annual, trien- 
nial, decennial, — class-books, histories, e^c, touch bonds 
of very deep interest. Sheldon thinks that three-fourths 
of the conversation in the charmed circle of class mem- 
bers is of each other, and that to judge character and 
eternally revise estimates of individuals is a great school 
of human nature or ethology, especially vahiablc because 
of the range of types represented. Class spirit, which is so 
often invoked, has left lasting monuments in nearly every 
American institution, and feeble and ephemeral as its 
organization its ties are strojig and lasting just in propor- 
tion to the breadth and depth of each member's humanity. 



34 

The American Greek letter fraternities are a unique 
organization, developing to some extent at the expense 
of the old debating societies, a little as the Corps grew 
from the Burschenschaften. Sheldon estimates that there 
are now one hundred and thirty thousand fraternity men ; 
that there are thirty-eight different organizations for men 
and fourteen for women, and more than five million dollars 
expended in l)uildings. Few things have been so hotly 
debated as their net good or evil. All the anti-Masonic 
sentiment has been directed against them, and it was this 
that compelled the Phi Beta Kappa to drop its aecvecy. 
By students outside them, they are often called undemo- 
cratic, clannish, exclusive in a way that impresses some as 
making life seem cold and hopeless. They are accused of 
unduly influencing college politics, or rivaling commence- 
ment exercises in attraction for visiting alumni, of develop- 
ing luxurious habits and perhaps worse under the guise of 
secrecy, of injuring class sentiment, of short-circuiting the 
expressions of the powerful social instinct which might 
otherwise be turned into religious work or larger literary 
organizations, and of narroAving love that ought to be 
broad enouo-h to include the entire college. 

On the other hand, many of the ablest and most judi- 
cious men in the country have not only been members, but 
keep up their interest by large subscriptions and annual 
visits to the society houses, often elegant and even luxuri- 
ous, and many like President White, lately of Cornell, 
have vigorously defended them. 

Their strength is great. The effort of Purdue in 1881 
to compel freshmen to sign a pledge not to join the fra- 
ternities met with disastrous failure. California in 1896 
was defeated in this issue. Vanderbilt strove to prevent 
members from competing for college honors. Michigan 
once expelled all members, and the Masons expelled the 
President. Princeton, which abolished these organizations 
in 1855, is perhaps the only large college now opposed to 



35 

them. In small colleges the Greek fraternities have some- 
times great power over the administration. The move- 
ments against these societies are spasmodic, and sometimes, 
if organized, end in the formation of a new secret society. 

The charm of secrecy is great, and the discipline of 
reticence perhaps has something to be said in its favor. 
Its fascination is greatly heightened b}^ wearing the l)adge 
somewhat concealed, or by never referring to the organiza- 
tion to outsiders, as is the custom among members of the 
" Skull and Bones " and of the " Scroll and Key " societies 
of Yale. Fancy often constructs wild conjectures of 
preposterous and perhaps cruel initiations, or develops 
extravagant conceptions of fellow classmen hobnobbing 
with sreat alumni behind windowless walls or in secret 
lodge-rooms. 

I have elsewhere advocated at length as an experiment 
worthy of trial in the appointment of some graduate mem- 
ber, who has specialized al)road perhaps and is waiting for 
a professorship, as resident tutor, in a few of these larger 
society houses. The expense would be slight, the presence 
of such a member would be a most salutar}^ tonic to the 
morale of the organization ; he could have ample time and 
opportunity for advancing his own studies and could set 
apart an hour for coaching fellow-undergraduate members 
in his field. If several adjacent chapter houses, repre- 
senting different fraternities in the same college, each had 
such a member, each a specialist in different branches, 
interfraternity exchanges for the benefit of the coaching 
hours might be arranged. In this way the strength and 
wealth of the fraternity might be made to supi)ort the 
academic work of the institution ; the college might possi- 
bly find here suitable candidates for vacant places in its 
professorial staff ; and the friction now often felt between 
the administration and the fraternity might be reduced. 
Again, the growth of these organizations, if it continues, 
may develop ultimately into powerful institutions, which 



36 

may some day become the analogues of the colleges of 
Oxford and Cambridge, which the tutorial methods here 
might represent. 

The strength of the spirit of social organizations in 
student life is remarkable. Clubs, sodalities, associations 
of almost every conceivable sort and for all purposes, 
abound. Eating, drinking, hunting in general, hawking, 
the special pursuit of many species of game on foot and in 
the air, for every kind of indoor and outdoor sport, for 
the most diverse political ends, for all social reforms, 
clu])s representing nearly all of the great philosophical 
systems, — stoics, cynics, sceptics, platonists, scholastics, 
idealists and all the rest, clubs for banterers, for drinking 
young hyson and stronger beverages, gambling, shooting, 
fishing, acting, playing practical jokes, nonsense clubs, 
wine clubs, essay clubs, associations for dietary reforms, 
for fighting, for wearing plain or eccentric clothing, elabo- 
rate organizations of those who stood lowest in class, clubs 
of liars, petty pilferers, associations for charity, for the 
propaganda of religion and even atheism, for travelling, 
for every special branch of intellectual culture and interest 
both in the sciences and the humanities, and besides 
these hundreds of pure funk organizations with nothing 
about them but high-sounding names and officers, who 
never had a meeting and were never elected, — all these 
bear witness to the intense pleasure at this age of life of 
simply being together, or even imaginary social bonds of 
association, intercourse, and everything that expresses the 
gregarious instincts so strong in human life. 

As we have elsewhere seen, the muscles undergo very 
great development in adolescence, and one of the most 
happy but new fashions of academic life is athleticism in 
its various forms, — boating, football, baseball, field and 
track events, and the evolution of the college gymnasium 
from its feeble beginnings only a few decades ago at Yale, 
Princeton and Amherst. During the early centuries uni- 



37 

versity .students were training for the priesthood, were 
ascetics, subdued the bod}^ took little exercise, at most a 
daily walk with one companion, like the apostles. Seden- 
tary life is particularly prone to reaction in forms of 
revolutionary violence. If the muscles had always had 
their rights in the past, the long chapter of academic crime 
and vice would have been far less black. As a safctv- 
valve for exuberant animal spirits and as a respectable 
topic for conversation, athletics have l)een a godsend. In 
the days of Jahn, FoUen and the Turner movement in 
Germany, physical training was sus})ected of revolutionary 
tendencies. Strong muscles, it was said, tended to make 
men assert their rights and liberties in a democratic way. 
This, especially in a republic, is precisely the reverse of 
the truth. An abundance of free muscular activit}^ not of 
course excessive or servile, is the best possible cure for 
revolutionary tendencies. Hence, despite the excessive 
exuberance with which college victories are sometimes 
celebrated, athleticism has vastly facilitated college disci- 
pline. 

The movement came suddenlj^, and faculties were at first 
unable to direct or conti'ol it. The Georgia legislature 
forbade it, and abortive efforts to this end were made in 
several states. At Princeton, Yale, and the University of 
Virginia it is still all left to student control. Elsewhere 
recourse has been had to many devices to secure faculty 
participation. The ethics and physiology of training were 
not at first understood. The large sums of money coming 
from intercollegiate sports were squandered, or sometimes 
temi)ted to dishonesty, until faculties insisted on auditing 
accounts, and money was sometimes used to bribe prom- 
ising athletic sub-freshmen in their choice of a college. 
But gradually the coarse pul)licity, tricks and objectionable 
professionalism have been reduced under the influence of 
men like Deland and Camp, and while we have as yet by no 
means learned how to make college athleticism a blessing 



38 

to the majority of students or an expression of the gentle- 
manly love of sport seen at Oxford and Cambridge, where 
it subordinates all efforts to resort to unworthy methods to 
beat, there is slow but sure annual progress in this respect. 
The public craze here in the football season, when the 
newspapers tire and perhaps turn the heads of the mem- 
bers of each team, so that it takes some time for life to 
settle back again to its uneventful course, is one of the 
worst symptoms of Americanitis and one of the chief 
obstacles to the goal of subordinating the passion for indi- 
vidual distinction to that of winning honor for the team, 
and of making the glory of the team tributary to that of 
the college. The larger and higher the unit toward which 
the loyalty is developed, the better the moral training of 
athletics. The more the benefits, both of its hygienic 
methods and its exercise, can be spread over the year and 
to all members of the institution, the better its function 
is discharged. The more the public can be understood to 
appreciate the real points of the game, rather than to 
gratify the same instincts which tempted the Romans to 
gladiatorial contests or now to bull-fights and pugilistic 
encounters, the better. Records are proud things to hold, 
and if those who excel in these contests instead of being 
good for little else are really, coming to be the representa- 
tive men of the class, there is progress. The best ideal in 
this respect is now seen in England, where many if not 
all of the twenty-one colleges often have their own crews, 
as well as other teams, and intercollegiate races, which 
attract great attention and in which the representatives of 
the university teams are selected, where all types of man- 
kind meet and mingle in the most democratic fashion, and 
where in general the position of a college on the river 
is the best index of its intellectual status. Before this 
ideal is realized, we have a long way yet to travel. 

The fighting instincts begin to be serious at adolescence, 
and their orowth rises and falls in animals and men with 



39 

love. Glory, which is the reward of victory and makes 
the brave deserve the fair, is in popular estimate never so 
great as when it is the result of conflict ; and while the 
human female does not as in the case of many animal 
species look on complacently and reward the victor with 
her favor, military prowess has a strange fascination for 
the weaker sex, perhaps ultimately and biologically because 
it demonstrates the power to protect and defend. Power 
always wins a certain respectful consideration for itself, 
and the law of battle is a form of the survival of the 
fittest, which has played a great role in sexual selection. 

Combat and personal encounter have a charm of their 
own, and one of the first fields for the development of the 
sense of justice is seen in the instinct which demands a 
free field, fair play, one at a time, and all the other condi- 
tions by which the really best may win. The fights of 
small boys are bitter, but their lack of strength makes 
them rarely dangerous. There is very much to be said in 
favor of some field for this tonic process of developing 
courage, testing metal, and every other source of strength, 
agility, and cunning here involved. The psychology of 
anger and hate is a theme of great practical fecundity for 
ethics. As fights become dangerous with the growth of 
strenofth, law and social convention divert or restrain this 
instinct, which boy life not only allows free scope but 
encourages. 

Academic history is rich in material for this study. In 
1345 the Oxford students disliked the wine which the 
college provided. A mug was thrown at the head of the 
steward and the broil orew into a battle between town and 
gown, where books were torn, buildings pillaged and 
burned, students migrated, and the Pope withdrew pri\i- 
leges. As late as 1854, in a row, a Yale student stabbed a 
rioter ; the mob tried to loot the college and to batter its 
building with a cannon, fortunately spiked by the police. 
For years the Yale bully club, captured in a scrimmage 



40 

with the sailors, was transmitted from class to class to the 
strongest man. Residents of a college town as a class are 
often dubbed muckers, barbarians, philistines, have always 
been victims of destructiveness, vandalism and sometimes 
outrage, especially where the college town is not so 
small as to ])e insignificant and not large enough easily to 
dominate morally and physicalh^ the hostile instincts of 
students. The latter as a class are more select, learned, 
clever, richer than the average residents of their age, 
and are preferred by the young ladies of the town, so 
that jealousy in its most acrid form is almost inevitable on 
the side of the town, and this is repaid with contempt and 
anonymous and protected insult on the part of the better 
organized and usually more resourceful students. Between 
boarding-house keepers and their guests, tailors and the 
haberdashers of all sorts, and students, there is always a 
large surface of friction, where antagonisms are generated 
and all is heightened by the license and irresponsibility 
of the more transient collegians, their exuberant animal 
spirits, practical jokes, etc. 

Antagonisms with each other are still more frequent, and 
take many forms from the elaborate code of the duello in 
its several academic forms ; the rushes between classes, 
cane fights, bowl fights, as in, the University of Pennsyl- 
vania, and the personal scrapping involved in these and 
actually incited by football, especially when between sopho- 
more and freshman classes. Class battles under various 
names, now only a survival, are still sometimes carefully 
arranged by seconds and set rules enforced whereby the 
parties are equally matched. Wrestling contests, which 
played once an important role, are now practically extinct ; 
and pugilism has never flourished save under the strict 
control of the gymnasium as boxing. At Princeton fresh- 
men for generations challenged the sophomores to fight, 
in immense posters surreptitiously placarded at night 
in letters visible at a great distance, although interest 



41 

centred mainly in the challenge and its effacenient. Per- 
sonal dignity, honor, prescriptive and traditional rights, a 
factitious and testy honor, still arouse hostile sentiments 
now generally kept in leash. The same tendency in a still 
more attenuated form is seen in the tendency of debates to 
lapse into petty wrangles and personalities ; in the rivalries 
and competitions of emulation between the various organi- 
zations, and in mtercoUegiate contests of various kinds. 
It is often seen toned down in caricature, satire and 
parody, and often breaks out toward the faculty as we have 
elsewhere seen. 

Morals and religion have had a very diverse history illus- 
trating all extremes ; at several periods almost every form 
of dissipation has prevailed. Drunkenness has offered in its 
most repulsive form, where at stated bouts students drank 
out of their boots or the shoes of dissolute women, under 
their arms, or lay upon the floor while their mates poured 
beer into their mouths through a funnel to enable them to 
win a drinking wager. Gambling has been a passion, 
burglaries have abounded in open day. During a good 
part of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the habits of 
German students were particularly bad, and Avhcn Vienna 
undertook to expel harlots from town for the benefit of 
students, it was unsafe for women to go on the streets 
unprotected. All the more elegant dissipations of club 
life have promi)tly found their way into academic circles, 
and conviviality and gourmandism have run riot. Self- 
abuse, we are told, had at several times and places wrought 
herculean devastations ; and cock fights, falcon hunting, 
the chase with dogs and birds, bowling, poaching, and 
many other practices which fashion sanctioned, but which 
sometimes a too strict morality condemned, have found a 
congenial home in the universities. The opposite extremes 
have l)een no less accentuated. The ecclesiastical character 
of early university life insisted upon almost every monastic 
rigor. Fast days, early matins and then college prayers 



42 

before daylight, hard beds, no fire, the severest parietal 
regulations, enforced the rule of poverty, chastity and 
obedience. In the Scotch universities most students were 
poor, sometimes walked to the college barefoot to save 
their shoes, carried all their possessions, worked hard and 
had no time for play. The old Lycurgus society at Yale 
advocated a plain Quaker-like dress and life, but the cos- 
tume was so unbecoming it died. Amherst had a vigorous 
anti-venerean society, and benevolent organizations in great 
numbers flourished. 

Religious reactions have been extreme. After the 
French Revolution, a wave of scepticism swept over nearly 
every European and American institution of learning. 
Free thinking was the fashion ; and the very small minority 
who strove to be religious were ridiculed, dubbed religiosi, 
or lap-ears, and held prayer meetings, if at all, in secret. 
In 1813 Princeton had grown very lax till four j^oung men 
met covertly for prayer and started a religious movement. 
In 1802 a society was founded at Harvard to arrest the 
decay of religion. In 1850 the Wingolf societies of theo- 
logical students only, were established for the cultivation of 
relioious sentiments. The data are not at hand to trace all 
these fluctuations. In general in Anglo-Saxon lands, 
religious sentiments have dominated at nearl}^ all times and 
in nearly all seats of learning, while on the continent, 
especially in Germany, universities have been seats of free 
thought. Perhaps the greatest laxity in early times was that 
which Puritanism at its rise strove so hard to correct. We 
have elsewhere seen the effects of revivalism on the Amer- 
ican colleges since the days of Whitefield. The year 1820 
saw a oreat auiifmentation of relio:ious feeling. The next 
year Brown University had the greatest revival in its 
history, and the famous haystack meeting was held at 
Williams, and the Mills societj^ of men pledged to mission 
work was established. 

The religious influence of the Young Men's Christian 



43 

Association has been very great in English speaking and 
especially in American institutions. These associations 
are now said to exist at four hundred and twenty-five 
colleges in this country, with more than twenty buildings 
devoted solely to their uses, and more than twenty-five 
thousand members — nearly one-fourth of the entire col- 
legiate body. Under their auspices two world federations 
of students have been held representing eleven different 
denominations. This organization flourishes best in the 
state universities, where religion cannot be officially taught. 
In 1898, Sheldon estimates that there were four thousand 
young men pledged to the work of foreign missions and 
engaged in their study, a far greater numl^er than could be 
employed. The ideals of militant Christianity are in a 
measure here revived, although there are still some fifteen 
thousand church members of all denominations in American 
colleges who are not connected with these societies. Their 
intercollegiate meetings, and especially their summer con- 
ferences, receptions to freshmen, their wisdom in abstain- 
ing from class politics, their hospitable buildings, have 
introduced a new spirit of confraternity. Very often 
Sunday-school and reform work is undertaken of an 
aggressive kind, and headed by the Prospect Union at 
Harvard valuable extension work is done among laboring 
men, women, and clerks. 

College journalism reveals in full and free expression 
the spirit of youth unchecked. Scores of ventures here 
have died from over profundity, but light, bright, brief 
productions best reflect student life. The history of the 
vari(ius attempts in this field, political, social, scientific, 
literary, poetry and prose documents, all the gush and 
sentimentality shielded 1)}' anon^'mity, the ponderous John- 
sonese, bombastic and every other affectation of style, 
while records of internal events, subtle but true reflections 
of the spirit of the age — most serious, most comic — 
elaborate treatment of the most trivial themes and the 



44 

platitudinous struggles with the deepest subjects, critiques 
of current authors, fasliions, skits about girls, professors, 
escapades, athletics, and in fine everj^thing not connected 
Avith studies and classroom work make these modern ex- 
pressions of student life invalualjle data for the study of 
the later phases of adolescence. Here we see the unique 
commingling of the most radical with the most conserva- 
tive tendencies. The extreme of sentimentality and fickle 
titanic yearnings of an age, which is at once most spir- 
itually drunk and sober, where everything is most ex- 
pressed to the wise but strives for greatest concealment. 
The philosopher of the future who wishes to study in 
further detail the psychic expressions of this age, when the 
wine of life is most actively fermenting, depositing its 
lees and evolving its higher spirituality, isolated and cut 
loose from the tAvo great regulators of human activity — 
social settlement and business — and revealing its own true 
nature, will find all this and more set down, as if for 
his use and delectation, in the files of American college 
periodicals. 



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